Watching “The Biggest Loser” a bit recently (yes that makes me the loser), it strikes me that we have made weight loss into a moral endeavour. “No pain no gain”. We invoke purity/sanctity, the message is “you have sinned, now you must do penance, and only then shall you be rewarded with weight loss”. It’s easy to just accept that, because it plays to our fundamental moral systems, but if you think about it rationally, it’s nuts. What’s really happening with weight gain is that we have a system (our bodies) with a regulatory mechanism adapted to calorie shortage, and no administrative override, no calibration features.